Today CWTS is releasing the 2020 edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking. As always, the release of the ranking requires a major effort involving contributions from a large number of colleagues at our center. This year, the COVID-19 crisis, combined with a major update of the internal data infrastructure at CWTS, created additional challenges, which has unfortunately led to a delay of almost two months in the release of the ranking.

Months into the corona crisis we are living in a world changed, for better or worse things are other than they once were. It is obvious many countries were underprepared, but does it make sense to ask—could this have been otherwise? Indeed, this is a prodigious question, one unlikely to be answered comprehensively by a blog post.

There are many reasons why we should be concerned with how science is portrayed in the news media, particularly given the ‘infodemic’ related to COVID-19. For example, over-hyped research results can lead to misinterpretation that may contribute, among other things, to public skepticism and distrust towards science.

“Fund and forget”, that is how Jordi Molas-Gallart from the research centre Ingenio (CSIC-UPV) in València teasingly characterized the way large national research funders often operate. It’s also a point of departure for thinking about new ways of research evaluation. The cornerstones of many forms of research evaluation are peer review and bibliometric analysis.

This post was originally published at Medium. The value of open and interoperable metadata of scientific articles is increasingly being recognized, as demonstrated by the work of organizations such as Crossref, DataCite, and OpenCitations and by initiatives such as Metadata 2020 and the Initiative for Open Citations.

The world of research evaluation is changing. In particular, we observe a growing need in research organizations for interactive, formative and tailor-made evaluation services. In response to this need, a team of CWTS colleagues has developed a new approach in collaboration with Ad Prins that we call the Evaluative Inquiry.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from all over the world and from multidisciplinary backgrounds are working on answers to the challenges raised by the disease. In this regard, the biomedical point of view is also accompanied by broader social, economic and political perspectives.

This article has been originally published at the TIB Blog. At the TIB AV-Portal, we have created a service to watch the Altmetrics Conferences and Workshops.

In July 2019, I came to Leiden in the Netherlands for a one-year research visit at CWTS. This was possible thanks to a grant by the Graduate Students Study Abroad Program from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in Taiwan. This grant supports domestic doctoral students to have a research stay abroad.

The COVID-19 pandemic currently striking the world is accompanied by the marked necessity of communicating reliable and understandable scientific knowledge around the disease. In this situation, the complexity of the scientific language may not necessarily be accessible to the broader public. This makes it necessary to have communicators and scientists able to translate the implications of scientific work for our everyday lives.

Your paper is based on a huge amount of data. How did you manage to get access to so much data? In the internal database system of CWTS, we have access to the raw data of Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. CWTS is probably the only center in the world that has access to all this data, so we are in a unique position to compare the different data sources.